Try the BBC Voices website, they’re cataloging the various accents and dialects in the UK. Here’s the map of the UK where you can select examples to listen to.
Yes, it would. That’s because Australian actors immediately and permanantly lose their native accents the moment they land in Hollywood. See: Russel Crowe, Nichole Kidman, Hugh Jackman.
Heh. They (actors) can’t even get Texas or Southern US accents right, you think they can get furrin accents right?
American English and British English have supposedly diverged but I never have had any trouble understanding a Yank whatever part of the U.S. they come from but a Glasweigan or Geordie in full flow ?Forget it.
This is a pet peeve of mine. A Texas accent is a Southern accent. Sounds very similar to a middle Tennessee/northwest GA accent (which makes sense, considering how much of the initial anglo population of Texas migrated from TN and GA).
Referring to “Texas or Southern US accents” is roughly the same as referring to “Alabama or Southern US accents,” it seems to me. “Texan” is just a variety of “Southern.”
I often see people making this dichotomy, and I think what is happening is that people are hearing Hollywood fake Southern accents and thinking “Well the Texas accent doesn’t sound anything like that.” Yeah, well, neither do actual Southern accents. There’s not a nickel’s worth of difference between Texas accents of say Ladybird Johnson and Ann Richards and George Bush on the one hand, and the accents I heard growing up in the stretch of geography between Nashville, TN and Rome, GA on the other.
To my ears some of the accents in the southeast of Ireland, Counties Wexford and Waterford sound vaguely American. The first time I met people from that area I thought they were born in America and had moved to Ireland.
That surprises me, because that’s my accent! Mind you, I can tell the difference between a Stirling (Sterling’s the currency, BTW) and a Perth one - but to my local ear they sound nothing like any American accent I’ve heard. Can you give an example of someone with that particular standard Mid-western American accent so I can have a listen to see if I can hear a similarity?
Me too, particularly if they’ve had a drink. I have trouble with even sober Aberdonians if they speak quickly.
The Bostonian accent (e.g. Major Charles Emerson Winchester III in M.AS.H. ) sounds more like English English to us than most other American ones
Depends on the part of Texas, though. I’m guilty of discriminating between “southern” vs. “Texan,” and I don’t have an explanation as to why I do so. I know in my heart from many years of experience that there’s no such things as a “southern accent” per se. There are shitloads of southern accents. I think in popular culture it’s common to depict some silly universal southern accent as applying to all states, except for Texas. Dunno.
I understand your point, but actually, I think there is a “Southern accent” per se. That is, there are certain markers that are common to all “Southern accents” be they from Virginia or Texas.
My own reasoned speculation is that those markers originated in the Jamestown colony and emanated from there along the southward and westward migration routes.
That would be the during the Paleocene, about 60 m.y. BP.
(Like Geobabe, I so rarely get to use my geology degree in GQ…)
I may not have run in the same circles in the Boston area growing up as Mjr. Winchester, but in my experience, anyone purporting from Boston, with that accent would have been laughed at regularly. Entirely too posh, with a disturbing number of “R” sounds.
Of course, my family is from slightly north of Boston, and there is a big difference from the Northshore “Boston” accent and one from the city proper.
I of course, have no accent at all! 
(Actually, I don’t in normal speech, but if I’m overtired, or drinking, it slips right back… I worked for many years to remove the accent, and am often accused of being from ‘somewhere else’, when I have lived my entire speaking life in the Boston Metroplex area.)
I’ve gotta ask out of pure curiosity: why would you work for many years to remove your native accent while staying where that accent is used? And then, that seems like a funny way of saying it. For example, I could never remove my Michigan accent (which isn’t an accent; it’s completely accentless just like on TV); I could only acquire a different accent. Now I’m being culturally obtuse again, I think, because from my perspective you’d be losing that lousy Boston accent rather than gaining another accent. Know what I mean, or am I just rambling too much?
I’ve actually traveled for work quite a bit, and got tired of the “Oh, you’re from Boston! Say ‘Pahk da cah in havad yahd’” stick. I also was a salesman for a long time, and found that a more “neutral, midwest type accent” helped me be better understood. Given my own way, I’d not have moved back to New England, but somehow I met the woman who is now my wife, and at the time, she was deeply seated in NH roots. If I wanted to marry her, I had to reside with her in NH. We are on the list to move inside my company to Raleigh NC, as this is not as much of a concern any more.
Also, as I mentioned above, the accent I had came from my Northshore family, who came mostly from the Lynn area, and I think that accent sounds trashy. I have been fighting a lifelong battle to elevate myself to a better postion, and I think that the first giveaway of someone’s intelligence is the accent, and the vocabulary that underlies the accent. :eek: I know this is very snobbish, but I’ve come to accept this fault in myself.
My experience is somewhat similar. Having moved in and out of NE a number of times, I would find myself losing the accent, but then picking it back up again as soon as I resided there for a few months. When you grow up hearing a certain accent, you don’t even notice it. But when you’re gone for awhile and move back, it can suddenly sound rather jarring, and you find yourself saying: I sounded like that!!
BTW, I know what you mean about the “trashy” aspect. One of the things I have a hard to explaining to people where I live now (CA) is how you automatically size someone up in Boston when you meet them depending on the particular accent they might have. I don’t like the fact that it happens, but it’s almost subconscious.